firespeaker.org

"His father's like ‘Don't fly too close to the sun Icharus.’ And he's like ‘This freakin' rocks! Woohoo!’"

[Jonathan shows Aaron a book on Qaraqalpaq written in French]

Aaron: "This orthography is.. what?"

me: "Inconsistent."

"We don't just want you to think that we're software designers with no understanding of theoretical linguistics. Then you wouldn't sit next to us in the coffee shop, and that would be bad."

Ray: "Phonetics can be a turn off."

Mark: "Depends on how you teach it, Ray."

Ray: "Most of these people [taking intro to linguistics] won't become majors—"

Mark: "And shouldn't."

Mark: "From your mouth to God's ear."

linguist: "It's an Indian mouth—he won't hear."

"And you're going to think, ‘Oh, the big thing is OT Pragmatics—I should do that.’"

me: "That's an abstract?!"

anonymous: "It's a very abstract..."

"[In phonology,] you can't just say ‘Oh, that's PF.’"

"Why do we keep weird strong verbs around for thousands of years?"